Leiter

Unethical prayer?
Saul Smilansky (Haifa) considers some cases.

Ezra Pound replies:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

—update: I haven't read the piece. I'm not going to pay for it or search it out.

The prayers he refers to are forms of special pleading, and I'm not impressed by anyone who claims to have discovered[?] that special pleading and justice as we define it are at odds. The only caveat would be that it offers more evidence of Israelis beginning to come to terms, honestly, with the logic and legacy of Zionism, and the evidence is there even if the author makes no mention of Israel and still claims to be a Zionist. That's how change works.
Some deny that Zionism is racism; no one denies that it's exceptionalism. update 2: see Schliesser above.—

Leiter, again

Alva Noe: Philosopher of Rock 'n' Roll!
Here.

"The Myth of the Particular"
Alva Noë is even more stupid than Colin McGinn.

Generalizations are not the highest form of thought; they're both the ideal and the average. It's much harder to recognize and then communicate specifics.  Musicians, actors, poets, artists and connoisseurs, trial lawyers and medical diagnosticians are specialists in particularity. They're "Particularists". It's Bertram's term; he should be more proud of it, but he doesn't understand how broadly it applies.

Successful pop stars are performers, acting through the tropes and contradictions of their peers. By the logic of academic philosophers, we should all be listening to Emerson Lake and Palmer.

Springsteen's weakness is the weakness of American liberalism: sincerity over seriousness.

Clement Greenberg vs T.S. Eliot and Marie Lloyd

Serious leftists are Burkeans, and David Brooks is not Kevin Phillips.

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jumping ahead: Emerson Lake and Parfit.

"Serious leftists are Burkeans." They're not positivists, and not futurists. They're anti-utopian. It's my definition of serious.